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Thursday, January 5, 2012

Another sip of "urban renewal" Kool-Aid

It always cracks us up when towns out in the boonies adopt "urban renewal" plans. It's hard to have "urban renewal" without an actual "urb" to "renew," but these communities go for it anyway. Basically, it allows local government to funnel tax dollars to construction companies and real estate developer sharpies, at the expense of basic public services.

The dinky hamlet of Sherwood (pop. 18,000) has been in on this game for quite a while, and now they're planning to extend their "urban renewal" district for another several years. They'll borrow money at not-so-great interest rates, spend it on schlock that the average resident could care less about, and then start deferring maintenance and cutting back on cops and firefighters.

Comments (4)

Do NOT give them ideas. Speaking from experience, there's nothing more pathetic than a convention center in the middle of nowhere, with no reason to visit the city other than the brand spanking new convention center.

Right now, we're seeing a similar run in the Dallas area on additional convention centers, or renovations of existing ones. Dallas itself is stuck socializing the cost of a big new convention center hotel planted next to its big white elephant, and this is right after the city of Irving opened up a gigantic new space. It's great for comics conventions and other small-potatoes customers, as everyone's fighting over offering the lowest prices for hall space, but the cities all act as if this will magically bring in more permanent business. In the case of the Dallas Convention Center, the city is crying over how many big shows are passing up Dallas for Fort Worth, and all I can say is "Yeah, and that's because Las Vegas has something going on downtown after 6 in the evening."

Sherwood's becoming an increasingly corrupt little burg, between the urban renewal nonsense and the nice little scam the police chief has going with the red light cameras (which was aided by someone at ODOT "accidentally" deleting the signal control software).

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